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A Dante Translation Paved With Ambiguous Intentions REVIEWED BY Cynthia L. Haven |
Sunday, April 9, 2000
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PURGATORIOA New Verse Translation By W.S. Merwin Alfred A. Knopf; 359 pages; $30W.S. Merwin is one of the most popular, beloved and honored poets in America. But Merwin's new translation of Dante's ``Purgatorio'' is an uphill climb, and not in the sense Dante meant it to be. Being billed as the ```definitive translation of our time,'' Merwin's ``Purgatorio'' is marred by an indifference to scholarship and verse that makes one wonder why he ever went ahead with this project, which has already been done better by others. The flaws show up early. In his introduction, Merwin claims to have a lifelong love of Dante, which he bares in confessional detail, yet he refers to Dante's famous first meeting with Beatrice ``in 1284, when he was nineteen.'' That occurred when the poet was a remarkable 9 years old, on May Day, 1274. It's one of the best-known events in Dante's life, carefully described in the poet's ``La Vita Nuova.'' Others gaffes follow. An egregious one occurs in Dante's portrait of rebuked pride in Canto 10. Merwin has an unspecified ``Michael'' lurking ``like a malicious and sullen woman.'' But it's Michal, the first wife of King David, not Michael. Michal, also Saul's daughter, thinks David has made a fool of himself ``leaping and dancing'' before the Ark of the Covenant. She's about to dump him in a big way. Merwin doesn't seem to know who she is (``Michael'' is repeated several lines later). It's not surprising Merwin got it wrong: In a note for one of the surrounding passages, he cites 2 Kings, but it's the wrong book of the Bible. It should be 2 Samuel. This isn't just scholarly nitpicking, it's fundamental, indicating that Merwin isn't seeing these stories as he tells them. He frequently shortchanges Dante's rich little vignettes. And, more important, he visits his indifference upon his readers by failing to give them even a footnote. So when Dante is assailed by voices on the Cornice of the Envious, it will be up to the modern reader to recognize ``I am Orestes'' as the voice of Pylades, attempting to take the rap for his condemned friend. And will anyone immediately recognize ``Everyone who finds me will kill me'' as the cry of Cain without some help? Merwin doesn't take much interest in the politics of ``Purgatorio,'' either. The Guelfs and the Ghibellines weren't the only factional fights of Dante's time. In fact, the feud that got Dante exiled was between the White and Black factions within the Guelf party. But, somehow, Merwin gets it all in a muddle. He refers at one point to Ghibelline Whites, and never explains the terms ``Whites'' and ``Blacks'' when he occasionally drops them. He also glosses over the astronomy and science of Dante's time, which frequently inform the cantos, as well as the complicated topography of heaven, hell and purgatory. Merwin seems uninterested in the philosophy, too: Dante's numerous discourses on love and the nature of the soul glide by without illuminating comment. Further adding to the carelessness, there are no glossaries, indexes, charts, maps and even descriptive headers to let readers know where they are. One could argue, of course, that Dante's first readers did not have such aids either, but they did have a common church, a common history and a common science. Fact is, Dante is nowadays inescapably scholarly. We don't know the personalities, liturgy, politics or the medieval science of his time, and it's these anecdotes and details that form much of the intellectual delight of reading Dante. But Merwin is a poet, not a scholar, right? So this could be considered a poetic translation, not a scholarly one. But then this raises the question, Does Merwin's interpretation lend Dante any new poetic strength? Merwin admires Dante's ``disturbing mantric tone,'' so one could expect he'd attempt to find some way to reproduce it, perhaps a loose kind of incantatory blank verse, at the very least. Instead, we get verse that rolls like a rough ride down a bumpy road, chopped up with distracting commas (sample line: ``repays, perhaps, negligence, and delay,'' or that seems to stumble over itself (``and I seemed to be there where those with him''). Many of Merwin's lines fall into iambic pentameter, but others vary anywhere between three and eight uneven stresses per line. Rhyme is random and halfhearted, perhaps in many cases accidental, and there's a good deal of lazy same-word rhymes (``it'' and ``me'' are repeat offenders). Consonantal rhyme, a mainstay of Robert Pinsky's 1994 translation of Dante's ``Inferno,'' is too haphazard to give a sense of polish to the whole. Let's take a sample passage, chosen at random from Canto 10, the canto mentioned above: is it not plain to you that we are worms born to form the angelic butterfly and fly up to judgment, without defenses? Now compare this with Charles Singleton's famous 1970 prose translation, here broken into lines: Are you not aware that we are worms, born to form the angelic butterfly that flies unto judgment without defenses? The resemblance is more than coincidental. Merwin gratefully credits Singleton, one of the foremost Dante scholars of the century, for his notes and translation. But one wonders what Merwin thought his own job to be. Without an overarching purpose sympathetic with the poet's world view, or an attempt at form, Merwin is left to do little except tinker with a literal translation and chop it into lines. For comparison, here's the same passage in poet John Ciardi's translation: Can you not see that we are worms, each one born to become the Angelic butterfly that flies defenseless to the Judgment Throne? Here's classicist and mystery novelist Dorothy L. Sayers' version: -- Don't you see That we are worms, whose insignificance Lives but to form the angelic butterfly That flits to judgment naked of defense? In the verbose and muddy introduction, Merwin elaborates his reservations about taking on ``Purgatorio.'' He offers shopworn observations about ``the ordinary and obvious impossibility of translating poetry or anything else.'' Charitably put, this ``Purgatorio'' is a profound mismatch between poet and translator. Dante was a man of the world whose thinking, poetics and theology are crisp and hard as biscotti, for whom the bitter and sweet of life were as sharply mixed as in a Seville orange. Merwin is an unworldly pineapple farmer-environmentalist, writing blowsy prose and impressionistic poems that are often characterized by fuzzy New Age metaphysics. One struggles to say something pleasant about this hasty translation, to find some mitigating circumstances. Certainly it is contemporary in tone, the language simple. But then, so is Singleton's prose, and there one can follow the original poetry on the facing page, with notes and indexes to boot.
Cynthia L. Haven writes frequently from Stanford on poets, poetry and literature. |
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